Contra His Incessant Whining, Obama Was Handed an Economy in Recovery

From the outset, the Obama administration has pushed one primary message to the public. They have never wavered, never faltered, never stumbled in delivering that message, which we hear on a weekly basis. And for good reason – that message has been their sole defense against the reality of our miserable economy. That message is this:

President Obama inherited a disastrous economic situation from President Bush, and only his quick, decisive actions have kept the economy afloat.

To now, the counter argument has been that certainly 4 years should have been adequate for our current President’s policies to have erased his predecessor’s mistakes. But I’d like to make a different argument – one that has a mathematical basis, and which leads inexorably to this simple conclusion:

President Obama and his administration are full of hooey.

An explanation is probably in order. As you may recall, the GDP was plummeting like a stone in the run-up to the 2008 election. It didn’t actually bottom out until the 2nd Quarter of 2009, which is the basis for the Obamian claims that they saved the economy.

But all plummeting is not equal. Your rate of plummeting can be increasing, it can stay the same, or it can decrease. If you look at the real GDP data (thoughtfully provided below), you can see that from its peak in Q208, it started falling slowly, then more quickly, then very quickly, then more slowly, and then it hit bottom and started rising again.

When the GDP transitions from increasing its rate of falling to decreasing its rate of falling, we have what’s called an inflection point [in mathematical parlance, it’s where the second derivative of the GDP = 0]. And that inflection point is where the economy is actually starting to turn around, i.e., where its rate of descent starts slowing.

You can see by eye kind of where that inflection point would be – about halfway down the plummeting part of the curve. But just to back it up with some math, I smoothed the data, applied a curve fit, took the 2nd derivative and found out where it equals 0.

And the answer is . . . . the last quarter of 2008.

Yes, folks, the economy had already started to turn around in the quarter before President Obama took office. The healing had begun before the Stimulus package, and before he started propping the economy up with huge deficit spending.

And by the time his policies did kick in? The economy braked like the President passing a golf course.*

The President has been hiding behind the “It’s all Bush’s fault” defense for four years. That excuse was always pathetic, but now we know that it’s untrue as well.

*A non-racist type of golf course not at all reminiscent of Tiger Woods